Grégory Schiano, Chief Technical Officer at Altissia, knew that if he wanted his DevOps team to build and scale quickly, they would need to break up into smaller project teams, with each team having smaller focuses that all laddered up to the department’s greater goals. The DevOps department at Altissia was an early adopter of cloud-native development, and has been working in Kubernetes for several years. For a small team, this meant a lot of time was spent making sure all of the developers were well-trained in Kubernetes so they would be able to work effectively with it.

One of Altissia’s largest projects to date has been building an online language learning platform for a large learning program. The linguistics program supports over 350,000 students learning the official languages of the EU—from Bulgarian to Swedish and everything in between. The success of the international program, and of each student, relies heavily on Altissa’s ability to keep its applications up and running.

With so many moving components, it became apparent that the team needed an observability platform. The team wanted to be quickly alerted when anything went wrong, have a tool to help pinpoint errors, and have visibility into some of the use cases and habits of end-users—insights that could guide the team for future updates to the application.

Schiano’s team evaluated two tools, IBM® Observability by Instana® and a competing product. The team ultimately chose Instana for a few reasons. The first was the ease that comes with built-in automation. “We love how easy it is to deploy and maintain the agent,” says Schiano. “There’s no operational overhead.”

The second reason was Instana’s core capabilities, especially its personalized visualization and collaboration features. Using the Application Perspectives feature, each team member can adapt their dashboard to their own monitoring needs. “We really love Application Perspectives. It’s the feature we use most,” says Schiano.

And the third reason, and why Schiano continues to renew, was his appreciation for the Instana team. “A part of my criteria for choosing a company to work with is their people, and I love the people working at Instana. We’re in close contact frequently. They know how to do their job. You can tell they enjoy working for the company, and for me, that’s amazing.”

Present on every continent, Altissia (link resides outside of ibm.com) runs a language-learning platform that enables organizations—including schools, businesses and government agencies—to bring multilingualism to students, employees and citizens. Altissia was founded in 2005 by academics from the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL). Its headquarters are on the university campus in Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium.

Instana, an IBM Company, provides an Enterprise Observability Platform with automated application performance monitoring capabilities to businesses operating complex, modern, cloud-native applications no matter where they reside—on premises or in public and private clouds, including mobile devices or IBM Z® mainframe computers.

Control modern hybrid applications with Instana’s AI-powered discovery of deep contextual dependencies inside hybrid applications. Instana also provides visibility into development pipelines to help enable closed-loop DevOps automation.

These capabilities provide actionable feedback needed for clients as they optimize application performance, enable innovation and mitigate risk, helping DevOps increase efficiency and add value to software delivery pipelines while meeting their service and business level objectives.

For more information, visit instana.com.